6 Tips For Collecting Valuable Customer Data This BFCM

We’re nearing November, meaning Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) is closer than ever.

The season of Christmas shopping means a significant increase in marketing activity for online stores. This also means a lot more website traffic for online stores.

BFCM allows you to boost sales numbers. But it’s also a great  opportunity to gather lots of valuable information about your customers. With the imminent cookie apocalypse, it’s more important than ever to collect first- and zero-party data.

We listed 6 tips you can use this BFCM to capture this type of customer data in a voluntary and consent-based way. All while respecting both the customer experience and your customers’ privacy rights.

1. Instagram polls

Apart from being a great way of engaging with your customers and audience, Instagram polls let you capture valuable first- and zero-party customer data with ease.

The different types of customer data you can collect

For instance, try using polls to ask your followers about their preferences for specific products or discounts in the run-up to BFCM. You could even promote these polls with some advertising budget. The data you end up with is bound to be of high quality and will help you prepare for the day itself.

2. Using surveys

BFCM means more customers, more sales, and consequently also more contact with customers. It’s the perfect chance to ask your customers for feedback using surveys.  

With more feedback gathered during the post-purchase stage of the customer journey it’ll become a lot easier to improve your webshop’s customer experience in the wake of BFCM.

You can use a survey tool like Typeform, Momentive, or even gather feedback directly in Messenger. Better yet, you can ask customers to leave photo reviews using these tools. This user-generated feedback is the perfect social proof for your store.

3. In your customer support channels

Higher sales figures also mean your customer support department will be busier than usual. You can benefit from this by not seeing customer support tickets as something solely negative.

In e-commerce, each customer touchpoint offers the possibility of strengthening customer loyalty. An unhappy customer whose problems are solved effectively tends to become more loyal to your brand than customers who were happy in the first place.

But a moment like this is also a great moment to gather customer data

For instance, if you find an exceptional amount of complaints arising from a specific product, this lets you identify optimization opportunities. Also, having successfully dealt with a complaint is the perfect moment to ask for feedback, or even reviews.

4. Through automated chat conversations

Did you know you can automatically react to comments on Facebook and Instagram posts with a private DM in Messenger or Instagram DM?

This feature is called Comment-to-Messenger. The Instagram version isn’t available just yet, but will be very soon.

In Messenger, you can then automate conversations and use these to send out surveys, quizzes or promotional codes. Chat conversations like these are perfect for capturing customer data in a low-barrier, casual and direct way.

Make sure you’re clear about what you will be using the data for. For example, you could tell people you will be using the data you collect to optimize your online store’s customer experience.

5. By using preference centers when onboarding new customers

We’re sure you’re aware it costs 7x as much to acquire a new customer than retaining an existing one. One way to stimulate customer loyalty is by making use of preference centers. You can incentivize new customers to create an account in exchange for discounts or other promotions.

Let these new customers fill out their preferences for specific products or other things like their sizes. This way you can collect very relevant and valuable customer data and other insights your business will benefit from.

6. Building opt-in lists of engaged customers

The best type of data is zero-party - self-reported and voluntarily shared - data of customers announcing they want to receive your marketing materials. There are several reasons why this customer data is so extremely valuable.

Use the Omni Opt-In tool to build high signal DM lists

Consent-based and spam-free

Of course you could go out and blast your email list with of previous customers with promotional emails for BFCM. But this doesn't mean your customers will actually open them. They might even be put off by receiving unsolicited emails in their inbox.

But a list where you let people opt-in to receive a one-time notification about something relevant to them is different. This is a list of people explicitly asking to be updated about your promotions, with a single exhaustive message, not to be bothered again.

Avoiding BFCM high advertising costs

BFCM isn't the best time of year to be running paid ads. Because of the wild competition, ad rates are a lot higher than usual. To avoid these high advertising costs, try running ads prior to BFCM, when rates are still significantly lower.

Use these ads to get people to opt-in to a one-off promotional for when it's BFCM. This way, you can reach an audience of highly engaged (potential) customers with alerts at the click of a button. Without having broken the bank on expensive ad rates.

You can use ShopPop's chat messaging platform to build these opt-in lists, and broadcast one-off DMs with open rates way higher than email, whenever needed. If you run a Shopify store, you can also use the Omni Opt-in Alerts for WhatsApp, Messenger and (soon) Instagram DM.

The importance of collecting customer data for D2C brands

Want to know more about the different types of customer data and how to collect it? Download our free whitepaper, ‘The importance of zero-party data for D2C ecommerce success’ below. In this industry report, we discuss the different types of customer data and give a few tips on how to best collect this data.

Or why don't you connect with ShopPop directly through Messenger at https://m.me/shoppophq